Carter Tilman - OSF Innovation: Phased Approach

OSF Innovation – Phased Web Approach

Role: Digital Strategist
Company: Franklin Street

OSF HealthCare is a health system in Illinois. Who was a recent client of Franklin Street regarding brand work for the health system. Then basically right after winning that we saw that OSF Innovation sent out a RFP for a website project.

OSF Innovation is a division in the OSF HealthCare system that is focused on changing the way certain things are done in healthcare as a whole industry. Their initiative is a pretty big goal and is something we really wanted to be a part of. So, we took responding to their RFP very seriously.

The first thing we did on evaluating their RFP was realized that they were asking for too much right off of the bat. We were able to identify this because we knew that the brand look and direction was a in a state of change. Also, the ask for the website build was too much in a short timeline. We identified that this would likely cause them to make decisions that were reactive and not rooted in strategy.

Because of this we recommended a phased web approach to this project. We made this recommendation to make sure that strategic decisions were being made, that the look could adjust over time to be more in line with the brand, as well as get something that we could agree to do with in scope for their initial timeline. The result was a response to an RFP with a microsite.

This type of response is something we saw as a great way to separate ourselves from the other RFP submissions. It was also something were I could start playing with an initial setup to get a head start on the prototype work that would be coming my way if we won the project.

It turns out we won the project with our RFP submission. The next step was to move into a client discovery phase and to meet with their selected development partner. Once accomplishing some loose business rules, and the basics for the client’s content strategy we were ready to move forward into wireframing and prototyping work for OSF Innovation.

Our wireframe work consisted of some quick sketches in a few whiteboard sessions, to work through the initial concepts and to develop a plan for the prototype. The prototype for this project was developed using the framework that was started for the RFP and combined with the work sessions completed through the wireframing stage.

The prototype was made fully responsive and with some micro animations built in. The reason for doing this was to get buy-in from the organization and to have efficient communication with the developer. It was important to have something of this high fidelity presented to the client, because there were 16 decision makers for this project (that is not an exaggeration).

After the prototype was approved by the client we moved into design work for this project. The scope for this project involved create two design versions based off of some of the client’s existing materials. We then went through another meeting with the leadership team, and got approval on a direction.

After this we reconciled the design direction, and working through the majority of responsive decisions we were done with the design portion. Then we met up with the client’s developer to hand over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for them to compile into a CMS and develop accordingly. Since everything was built in the browser the hand off to the developer actually went very smoothly. Also, since everything was created in code we did not need to over document our design files or over communicate the small details. Everything was already there and accounted for. It resulted in a great transition between design and development.

This work completed phase one of the phased approach. Phase two and three are still to come, and they will be built on the direction established in phase one and the work plan laid out in the RFP stage.